Story Excerpt
Schismogenesis
by E.G. Condé
Little Bao winced. It was not the rain that bothered him, for it was gentle and almost molten with warmth as it dripped through the wispy leaves of the Angsanas sprouting up from the mud. The boy grimaced at the figure before him, carved as it was from some cheap synthetic simulacrum of stone. The pigments, a smattering of cerise, magenta, turquoise, and a once-electric hue of green, were fading. Cracks interrupted the intricate curlicues and radial spokes that terminated in feathers, claws, and an expressive visage set beneath a bejeweled crown. Suparna sensed that the source of her younger brother’s fear was the lidless eyes that bulged out from the ornithic statue’s head.
“We walked through the Ten Courts of Hell,” Suparna said, gripping his trembling shoulder, “and you’re scared of a bird?”
Little Bao continued to peer, as if entranced, “It’s much worse than that.”
Suparna appraised the statue; its dense wings unfurled as if caught in a wind; a rosy beak opened to reveal hominid teeth; lissome arms gripping the whorled edges of its pinion throne. “Garuda.”
Bao inclined his head toward his sister with awe.
Suparna went on to recount how stories of the mythical creature had spread from the Indian subcontinent to the archipelagoes of Indonesia, mutating with each retelling over centuries as the lands shifted crowns and faiths. For some the creature was a he, the noble steed of the supreme deity Vishnu. For others, the Garuda was one of many avian beings designed to oppose a wicked race of serpents known as Nagas. In the Malay Archipelago, the Garuda persisted as a reminder of the great civilizations that preceded Allah’s light, she told him. Muslim by faith, Hindu by civilization, Buddhist by trade; that is what their father had told her, when he brought her here to the Haw Par Villa for the first time.
Now that what the child had perceived as a monster had been demystified, he looked at it with renewed interest, his eyes darting back and forth from his sister to the creature, as if excavating traces of her story in its mottled contours. Suparna smiled, recognizing in his gaze the careful attentiveness of an artist. Father would never approve, but she could.
“Did you know?” Suparna crouched down to his level, adjusting her tudong to protect her eyes from the rain. “This is my favorite sculpture in all of the park.”
Her brother turned to look at her, a pale, round face set against profound but kind eyes, as dark as the barks of the Angsanas behind them. The face of their father. “May I ask why?”
Suparna grimaced. Then she swiveled around to see if anyone was watching them, watching her. A tall figure with broad shoulders that stood out everywhere she went, despite her modest appearance. There was an honesty to children that was at once brutal and refreshing. Somehow the boy knew, his painterly mind connecting the brushstrokes that brought her and this Garuda into alignment. Already he had deduced that she was one breath away from pariah, born of another mother, born . . . different. “You already know.”
Suparna was grateful for the rows of spindly gelam that shaded the paths winding through the data centers, office buildings, and laboratories that dotted the meticulously engineered landscape of the Jurong East business park. Crossing a footbridge over the canal, turgid and yellow with jungle sediments, Suparna spotted the scintillating helices of plastichrome that formed the base of operations for a number of biotech firms. By design, the iridescent twists of architecture were interrupted with the dense pockets of foliage and saffron-hued flowers of species like Syzygium myrtifolium, which absorbed solar radiation and minimized, however marginally, the air conditioning needs of the facilities that stood there. As a greater coucal whooped from some unseen branch, Suparna reached the security checkpoint. With a gentle flash, a scanner worked to authenticate her identity, mapping with utmost precision the round contours of her face beneath her veil. It lingered for a moment, as it always did, on her asymmetric eyes; copper-brown save for a rogue patch of green in her left eye. Sectoral heterochromia.
The elevator carried her to Srivijaya Genomics, where the voice of a greetbot welcomed her with sterile cheer. Blue-white lights flickered on in quick succession as she approached her workstation. Under the microscope, life was less distinct. Even now, after years of study, the seemingly boundless diversity of forms narrowed to a predictable pattern. The infrastructure of DNA provided a template with few significant updates over the course of nearly four billion years. She stared at the tumor cell, an immortalized trace of her mother, endowed with the high radiation tolerance of tardigrades by way of her parents’ proprietary technology, a development that rendered CRISPR-Cas9 elementary by comparison. To untrained eyes, the magnified blobs and spots on her slide might have not elicited much of a response, but to her, they were more beautiful than the peacock flowers her deceased Caribbean mother loved so dearly. The waterbears’ gift of elemental resilience, coupled with the relentless replicatory drive of Mother’s cancer cells, made this cellular culture practically immortal.
She marked it for incineration with other similar experiments. The ones that Father had unofficially sanctioned when he instructed her to achieve a 95 percent success rate with SiddhayatraTM, the virus they designed for genetic therapies. Since their meteoric success with the Androvirus vaccine, Father had become paranoid. Obsessed with the risk of intellectual property theft, Father let go of most of his employees, turning more and more to automation, and intensifying surveillance in their facilities—and, much to her surprise, entrusting Suparna with oversight of the lab, while he managed the business side of things.
Turning away from the microscope, instruments, and computers where most of her work was performed, Suparna approached the specimen habitat. She was delighted by the gentle squeaks of the chimeric mice as they rushed to greet her, eager for stimulation beyond their routine of exercise and sustenance. “Selamat pagi,” she whispered to the critters, their whiskers bristling as if in response.
Ultraviolet lamps revealed flickers of cerulean bioluminescence in their murine coats, one of SiddhayatraTM’s earliest success stories. Adjacent to the glowing rodents were stranger shapes–neon-green butterflies with algal chloroplasts that allowed them to feed through photosynthesis, and her favorite, a fruit-bearing shrub with arachnid legs, a prototype for a mobile crop that her father had branded as “mosskin,” for the bryophyte alleles used to stabilize their meshwork of genomes. The gallery of chimeras wriggled before her, some altered later in their lives through xenotransplantation, while others, like her, were born already entangled with the genetic material of another.
“Rest well, kindred.”
In her reflection on the plastichrome cages she saw the ghost of her mother, Kairi, the Antillean pioneer who built a genomics industry in the West Indies, seeking to break the growing dominance of its archipelagic counterpart in the East. Like the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean was a crossroads endowed with sufficient genetic diversity to accelerate scientific progress on gene therapies. Kairi met Father at a genomics conference in Iceland, and what had begun as a business partnership intensified into a marriage. Together, they dreamed lofty fantasies of curing cancer and other diseases, building Srivijaya Genomics to achieve those noble ends. But Kairi did not live long enough to see SiddhayatraTM pass clinical trials.
A soft bell preceded the voice of the greetbot. “Message from Lee Seng Bulat.”
Suparna stroked the fine hairs along her upper lip. She often wondered if this androgynous feature were an effect of the chimerism that partitioned her body into a genetic kaleidoscope. The sibling that vanished when she was in the womb, the one she fused with before birth. Suparna stiffened as her father’s Silhouette beamed into view.
“Father, you honor me with this visit.”
The lanky, silver-haired man before her looked wearier with each passing day, the puffy cheeks that Little Bao inherited scored with wrinkles. “Make yourself presentable for dinner.”
Suparna ignored the slight against her appearance, scratching the hair over her lips that she had forgotten to shave. “Dinner?”
“With Charlotte and your brother. We have a major development to discuss.”
Suparna nodded, swallowing her contempt for the woman who she refused to see as her mother’s replacement. The young socialite upstart who had clawed her way into her father’s heart within a year of his Idda for her mother Kairi. “I will be ready by the hour.”